Saturday, September 16, 2006

A bit late to the party, Swiss magazine Weltwoche features Kevin Rose on the front page this week.

Their subtitle: "The Internet is hot again – and Kevin Rose is the Dot-Commander". I was happy to see that their article (German) was a lot less hype-y than the BusinessWeek piece. They also paid a visit to Bill Gross in L.A. and talked to Nicolas Dengler of CoComment and Lars Hinrichs of openBC to add some local perspective.

Friday, September 08, 2006

A quick update on BarCampZurich, the unConference I'm helping organize. It takes place on October 28, 2006 in Zurich, Switzerland.

We finally found space for the BarCamp! We'll be at ETH Zurich, in the CAB building. There will be WLAN (free) and a bar for snacks and drinks (free once we find sponsors). There's room for about 100 attendees.

Corsin and I have been hard at work recruiting speakers and attendees. Our efforts have paid off: Our speakers now include famous Swiss entrepreneur and investor Nicolas Berg, Douwe Osinga, one of the guys behind Google Trends, as well as Cédric Hüsler from local.ch, the guys behind the popular collaborative editor SubEthaEdit, and many others. The number of signed-up participants has doubled in the last 24 hours.

If you want to help promote BarCampZurich, put one of our pretty banners on your site or blog. They come in all shapes and sizes.

Sunday, September 03, 2006

I've accepted an offer from Google and will start working at the Zurich office in November. As a big fan of Google, I have fond memories from my internship there 2 years ago. As an alternative, I had thought about joining a number of startups, which could have been far more lucrative, but potentially less enlightening.

Decisions

Rest assured that this decision was made in an Excel sheet with pros and cons and expected net values with estimated probabilities.

My great fear with Google is that it may have become a corporate behemoth, along with all the stupid rules, book-sized guidelines, and people who merely serve as bottlenecks. If they are, Freedom Fighter Gabor will be in deep, deep, trouble. If they still have the friendly attitude from 2 years ago, things will be great.

Performance

This is the first point in my life where I had to decide between becoming an entrepreneur and becoming an employee. The great thing about being an entrepreneur is that you escape the gravity of average performance: There are huge variations in the output of recent university graduates. But big companies, even those claim to be a meritocracy, cannot pay these kids by actual output.

The reasons: First, performance may be hard or impossible to measure – what's the value of a new algorithm? Second, having huge differences in pay between employees may lead to social unrest. And third, some of the highest-performance kids do not actually know that they're worth much, so why pay them more?

Startups

The only way to get paid according to your market value is to directly address the market. That's exactly what startups do. But there is a huge amount of luck factored in. Personally, I'm fine with risk. The problem of being an early employee at a startup, however, is that you get substantially lower stakes than the founders, but put in comparable amounts of work and carry a similar risk.

So why not start a startup myself? Well, you need to have the people, the idea, and the money. I had been thinking about this intensely, but at all times, at least one component was missing. And with one of my potential cofounders joining me at Google and the other one going to a startup, that idea disintegrated. Maybe another time.

Self-Censorship

Marcus Foster has a good point: Once employed at a high-profile company, you have to self-censor. I'm not sure what the policy at Google is these days, but getting fired for blogging about company secrets is not one of my ambitions.

I still have plenty of topics for essays and thoughts I want write about. Once I've handed in my thesis on October 3, I will try milk every last bit of thought from my brain and commit it to a blog entry.

About Me

Gabor Cselle
San Francisco, CA

I work at Google, where I'm a Partner at Area 120. Previously, I worked at Twitter on trends, the logged-out homepage, and on MoPub. Twitter acquired our startup Namo Media in June 2014. Before Namo, I was a Product Manager at Google working on Google Now, Android and Gmail. I started reMail, a mobile email startup which was acquired by Google in February 2010.

Before reMail, I was the VP Engineering at Xobni, where we invented a popular plugin for Outlook, and a Software Engineer at Google. I have an MS degree in Computer Science from ETH Zurich in Switzerland.

Views and opinions expressed here are mine and not those of my employer Google/Alphabet.